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Because Backtrack 5 is important, you should identify which wireless NIC's support it.
Then see if it is available in a mini-pci form factor. If so, you can easily replace the wi-fi
in most notebooks. I replaced the wi-fi on my old Dell notebook with an Intel card a few months ago. It was a no-brainer.

So I went wild and went outside of my budget, $1189. And got the MacBook Pro. Saying this, I know that BackTrack boots and works on my MacBook (less then a year old and gave it to my wife, aren't I so nice). Also the battery life which is 7 hours, though i think thats a reach, and you have to have everything off. So I think 4-5 hours wont be too far of a stretch. Also the backlit keyboard and touchpad are really nice. The only downside is the intel graphics card. I hate myself for getting the 13'' with the on board graphics. But in the end i don't need something im going to game on that much. (Though I can play CS & a few other Valve games.)

@nihil BT was (a) absolutely essential to me. Otherwise I would have kept the Asus and lived with the battery life, but not having an injection capable laptop on a $1200 computer is outrageous, i have no idea what Asus was thinking. Though I don't think most gamers spending $1200 on there laptop really care about it. But for me its something i really would like to have.

On the downside about the mac, #1 is price unless you make more then minimum wage and then a lot more. It's likely not really worth it. Unless you have other reasons to do it. (I also do web design and PHP, and i feel inspired when using my macbook and so it was something that was an added touch.)
#2 The price
#3 Right click ... jk just change the settings. And you gets lots of other clicks (gestures).
Though other then that I can't really think of many, but i really do like it, and think its worth the money. Though I think this thread is a really good resourse for others who have laptops and want to look at cheeper solutions. And we should keep this going with more options and cheeper ideas, though i know some will want a pricy solution. So if you have the money, dont mind being called a fan boy and want BT to work a MB or MBP isn't a bad idea.

Even though my personal dream machine that I'd skull **** a baby to own, is an SGI, I do LOVE the Macbook Pro. It's Beautiful, it's neat, and it's all around awesome. The only problem is that damned price.

I wish SGI made Laptops with IRIX..... That one you can see in.... Jurassic Park is it? Was actually made by SGI, but it's just a Prop, nothing more. If only they made real ones.... Damn.

but not having an injection capable laptop on a $1200 computer is outrageous, i have no idea what Asus was thinking.

Hah! that one is easy!

Like all OEMs they were thinking of making money. Over here at least, I would say that 99&#37; of the population haven't even heard of packet injection, let alone know its requirements.

Furthermore, 99% of laptops ship with Windows because that is what customers want or are prepared to accept. It seems to be an assumption that if you want to run *nix distros it will be in a multi-boot environment, so you get Billy Windows whether you like it or not?

To an OEM, packet injection isn't even a "nice to have"..............it's bloody irrelevant!!!

I think this thread is a really good resourse for others who have laptops and want to look at cheeper solutions. And we should keep this going with more options and cheeper ideas

Now, you really hit the nail on the head in your first post when you mentioned "drivers" (several times )..................basically all WiFi cards are capable of packet injection, it is just that they don't have the drivers for it.

ua549 makes a very interesting contribution with this:

Because Backtrack 5 is important, you should identify which wireless NIC's support it. Then see if it is available in a mini-pci form factor. If so, you can easily replace the wi-fi in most notebooks.

That got me thinking about my home setup. Most of my machines are 10 years old or so, and don't have a WiFi card, so I use USB wireless adapters instead.

It occurs to me that if you can find an adapter that has drivers that support packet injection, you can run Backtrack on any machine, or any number of them, for the cost of only one adapter? (and you won't need a screwdriver ). Realtek and Ralink might be good places to start?

That would leave you free to select your laptop on the other parameters, and greatly increase your choices.

otherwise you're stuck with a usable size of 2 to the 32 power = about 3.6 GB

Not exactly. IIRC the Intel Pentium Pro introduced the 36 bit address bus back in the mid-1990's. There are several 32 bit operating systems that use 36 bit addressing including some versions of Windows and most versions of *nix. In addition almost all of the current operating systems have 64 bit versions available.

(I ran 32 bit Windows Server on my 8 core 16 GB memory server several years ago. I also tried 32 bit BSD on that system with full memory access.)